Re: Structural regular expressions

[Lawrence Mitchell]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
>> Would generalizing the narrowing behavior to arbitrarily many ranges in
>> a buffer instead of a single range have extensive ramifications?  Would
>> this be an easy or difficult thing to implement?

> Since the non-narrowed part is not displayed at all, it wouldn't be
> quite what we want anyway.
> We'd need to add something new, tho it could be based on something
> pre-existing (e.g. it could rely on text properties like to `invisible'
> and/or `intangible').

>> If it's not too difficult then providing behavior like that mentioned in
>> the article above should be trivial.

> Nothing's trivial when you have to ensure some amount of backward
> compatibility with code written many years ago ;-)

> But of course, it would be OK to start with something that may break
> pre-existing code, as long as it's only broken when you use the
> new feature.

> And I agree with Lennart, that such a new tool, if done right, could be
> a good basis for better multi-mode support.

A halfway house, similar to that suggested by Drew, would be
something like
http://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/~s0198183/multi-region.el.  ISTR some
discussion when it was posted in g.e.sources, *grovels through
mail*:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.sources/1390

Maybe this is a useful feature to now think about incorporating
:P.

Lawrence
-- 
Lawrence Mitchell <address@hidden>